Cardiff jangle pop heads Bramwell talk us through the band’s beginnings, touring with The Tubs and their plans for a debut album.
Bramwell singer Tom Grogan is explaining how much his teenage self looked up to Gob Nation – the DIY collective which houses The Tubs and a billion other bands – when a huge crashing noise reverberates around the green room. Is somebody breaking in? Has something fallen through the pretty rickety looking ceiling? Has somebody fallen down the stairs? No. It turns out that The Tubs’ guitarist Dan Lucas is working on a new bit: he’s gotten really good at falling over on demand.
“There’s been a lot of this sort of stuff on the tour,” laughs Grogan. “A lot of pranks. They set up a domain email for this fake Norwegian journalist and said we had to do an interview on the top of a mountain at 6am, the peace offering was that we’d get traditional fish caught for us. We got them back in Liverpool because we got Half Smile to message their Instagram account and accuse them of stealing a patch cable. They took it seriously and were absolutely fuming.”
“It’s embarrassing to talk about with them all in the room,” Grogan says as he picks up where we were. “But I massively looked up to the Gob Nation stuff when I was in school. I remember Owen doing Cotton Crown — basically The Tubs’ songs before that band existed. I then met Niall and George in Exeter and they were doing a similar thing with Spinning Sister. We now get to be a part of both worlds, which is so cool.”
When Grogan formed the band with drummer Sol Drury and bassist Avalon Vowles as teenagers, they were mostly playing covers of songs by The Fall and The Beatles. It wasn’t long before they were writing their own material but took a little time to land on the sound they have now. “I remember seeing them before I joined and I thought they sounded like Black Midi” laughs guitarist Niall Ivie, “that was a more relevant reference at the time.” Nowadays, it’s difficult to imagine such a thing. Bramwell have been gradually crafting a distinctive brand of irresistibly jangly power pop, and the release of stellar double A-side ‘Standing on Stones’ and ‘British Rails (Are Long and Fast)’ earlier in the year strengthened their claim as a defining presence in a strong wave of such bands. “We wanted to make this kind of music for a very long time,” explains Vowles. “It’s a really happy coincidence that there seems to be lots of bands who want to do that at the minute.” The kind of music they’re referring to isn’t difficult to pin down. Indebted equally to the lo-fi charm of early 1980s groups like Cleaners from Venus and psych pop stylings from a couple of decades prior, there’s something really endearing about how earnestly Bramwell embrace their influences.
What’s even more charming is how much they glow when talking about their contemporaries. “Because me and Niall both do pushbike too, we just play all the time. You see a lot of really good stuff,” says Grogan. “It’s not even like a lot of these bands sound similar, they’re just great bands with a similar outlook on music.” They mentioned Hopalong Gretzky, Vehicle, Autocamper, Tigers & Flies, Troutflies and Pypi Slsh. A move away from elaborate art-rock and dingy post-punk and towards hookier structures and brighter sounds is something that the band are enthusiastic about. “Anything after that really early Windmill stuff isn’t really interesting to me,” offers Ivie. “One band that were in the early Bramwell blueprint were Dry Cleaning,” Grogan adds. “They fit that post-punk thing but the guitar lines are so melodic and there’s loads of power pop influences in there. I got really into Guided by Voices through Dry Cleaning.”
The band are in the process of recording a debut album in their adoptive hometown of Cardiff. “It’s going to take a billion years because we’re doing it in our flat but we’re never home,” laughs Vowles. When they have spent time in the Welsh capital, they’ve found their feet in the scene. “We’ve done some recording with Tom Rees from Buzzard Buzzard Buzzard because his studio is close to where we live,” says Grogan. “It’ll be ten minutes across 45 minutes, if not shorter. Some of the songs are very short.” It’ll seem to many like the full-length has come about pretty quickly, their first release on most streaming platforms only surfaced last year after all. But the reality is that Bramwell, indirectly at first, have been slowly crafting the record since their school days. They’ve been gradually honing a brand of contemporary power pop that they are now steadfast purveyors of. That album cannot come quick enough.
